This morning, while sipping my steaming hot and deliciously aromatic Mountain chai with creamy half and half and gazing out my window at the cerulean sky, I pondered on the inevitable curiosity borne of dissecting why working authors succumb to the passion of crafting overwrought prose.

Did you have trouble reading the above sentence? Did you read it twice to figure out what I was talking about? Did you wonder why I didn’t just say, “This morning, I thought about why writers use overly descriptive language”?

If you answered yes to any of the above, then you know exactly why overwrought prose makes our list of openings to avoid.

So often we come across submissions in which writers are trying to play with language, but they’re often playing with it at the wrong time. If you just need to convey that a character smiled, then “He smiled” is far preferable to “His lips quirked up at the corners, his sudden smile lighting up his face in such a way that I knew he was happy” is overdone. But newer writers, still mastering craft, often make the mistake of using fancy words and “phrasey” sentence structure all throughout their work…and this slows a story down rather than moving it along.

He smiled.

Done.

The point is the smile, not how the character did it.

Expansion and Contraction

One thing to keep in mind as you revise your own writing is the concept of expansion and contraction. Bestselling writers know when to expand their prose and when to contract it. They expand when they want to slow readers down to ensure they take notice of something important to the development of character or plot. They contract when they need to keep things snappy and simple to keep readers interested as the story moves over points of low conflict or tension, or transitions from one turning point to the next.

Newer writers, on the other hand, tend to expand a little too much—a big reason such writers wrestle with high word counts. Learn (a) that contraction is a tool in your toolbox and (b) when you need to use it, and you’ll be well on your way!

So is there a time or a place for more elevated prose? Absolutely. But save it for scenes in which you need a certain type of prose to set a certain type of tone. Save it for a moment of gravity, to let the words shine.

7 Responses

When I see a post about what agents are not looking for in novels or opening pages, I get nervous at first and I read what you post about, then I relax and relies that I am still doing good and I continue writing. Thank you for being there for the writers out there. We need someone to continue to steer us in the right direction. After all you and your staff have been doing this far longer than all of us who are up and coming. It is good to know you have our backs even if you one day do not choose to represent our work.

It was a dark and stormy night.
I really liked that opening, and wanted to use it, come what may, for the tongue-in-cheek lack of seriousness to be involved; after all, doing a gay, erotic fantasy with a GOT ambiance isn’t for everyone — . Though it is super sexual, bloody, and romantic, with men and women all mixed together, but mostly big muscled, hugely endowed males making it with each other. If 50 Shades of Grey can be for women, why are men into men ignored… except by the fluffy females who write such stuff, and mostly for the same readership? Amazing to me. Though the stuff for men tends to have no redeeming values; in mine, however, I do. So I started off with:

Splinters of lightning ripped through the dark, rages of rain following. Dull thunder, winds ravaging. I paused to determine the faint lines of the shelter ahead. We had planned well, I thought. Yet who was to say what awaited me inside was really about to be, or happen?

SOLD!! As announced in PW, Jillian Manning at Blink has bought New York Times and USA Today bestselling author CJ Lyons’ YA psychological thriller The Color of Lies. High school senior Ella Cleary has synesthesia—a condition that causes her to see a riot of colors with each interaction. But when she meets a boy she can’t read, she discovers he holds the secret behind her parents’ death. Publication is scheduled for Fall 2018; Kristin Nelson brokered the deal for North American rights

Congrats to Josh Malerman on a Starred review in Publishers Weekly for GOBLIN: “Fans of creepy, eerie, and genuinely unsettling horror will devour (or be devoured by) this set of vignettes about the aptly named town of Goblin, Michigan."

Via Deadline Hollywood, Jamie Ford’s bestselling debut novel Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is being developed into a film. Producer Diane Quon announced that she has acquired the film rights with Joseph Craig of StemEnt as producer & George Takei as executive producer.

In a Deadline Hollywood exclusive: Paramount Pictures has acquired film/TV screen rights to DRACULby Dacre Stoker & J.D. Barker--the first prequel authorized by the estate of Bram Stoker. The film will be developed as potential directing vehicle down the line for Andy Muschietti, reteamed with IT producers Barbara Muschietti and Roy Lee.

SOLD!! Via Publishers Weekly, in a six-figure North American rights agreement, Dacre Stoker and author J.D. Barker sold a Dracula prequel entitled DRACUL to Putnam after a five-house auction. DRACUL is about a 21-year-old Bram Stoker meeting the demonic being—“whom he traps in an ancient tower, all the while scribbling the events that led him there”—who will go on to become the subject of his iconic 1897 novel. Mark Tavani at Putnam acquired Dracul from Agent Kristin Nelson, which has also sold in the U.K. (to Transworld) and in France (to Michel Lafon). Dacre Stoker is the great-grandnephew of Bram Stoker.

SOLD!! As announced in Publishers Weekly: in a six-figure acquisition, David Levithan at Scholastic bought Ally Carter’s standalone YA debut, Not If I Save You First. Levithan took North American rights to the book from agent Kristin Nelson, who has an eponymous shingle; Nelson described the work as “a gender-swapped YA Romancing the Stone.” In the novel, a Secret Service agent’s daughter must travel into the wilds of Alaska to save the son of the president--but not if she kills him first. The book is set for a March 2018 release.

As announced in Hollywood Reporter, Sandra Bullock is set to star in Netflix's post-apocalyptic thriller of Josh Malerman's Bird Box. Danish helmer Susanne Bier will direct from a screenplay written by Eric Heisserer (Arrival). Production begins in September 2017.

Huge congrats to Sherry Thomas on hitting the USA Today Bestseller list at #86 for her debut mystery in the Lady Sherlock Series: A STUDY IN SCARLET WOMEN.

7/20/2017 Hollywood Reporter breaks news: Hugh Howey'sSAND adaptation is in the works at SyFy from Universal Cable. Gary Whitta (Rogue One) will pen the adaptation, and Marc Forster (World War Z) will direct the pilot.

SOLD!! As announced in PW Children's Bookshelf, Emilia Rhodes at HarperTeen has bought at auction in a very nice deal The Girls of Cottonwood Hollow, a YA contemporary novel with a twist of magical realism from debut author Miranda Asebedo. After a tornado unearths the century-old diary of the dying woman who cursed the girls of a rural Kansas town with strange talents, brash mechanic Rome and her two best friends discover that the curse and the stories surrounding the town legend aren’t all true. Publication is planned for fall 2018; Kristin Nelson did the deal for North American rights.